Eleanor and I went out to the cinema last night, to catch the third Pegg/Frost/Wright installment in the oddly-named "Cornetto trilogy," none of which really have much to do with each other (or Cornetto ice cream cones) except the Pegg/Frost/Wright part. And the awesomeness.

This one's titled World's End, and it begins, 20-odd years ago, with an attempted pub crawl through twelve of the licenced establishments in the fictional English town of Newton Haven (actually based on the real English town of Letchworth Garden City, which ironically has one of the lowest counts per capita of pubs in the whole country). Switching quickly to present day, Pegg's Gary King character "gets the band back together," said band consisting of four other, far more sedate members of the upper middle twit British class, including Frost and Martin Freeman in between gigs on sets with hobbits, consulting detectives and hedgehogs.

Watch the names of the pubs carefully, as they pretty much lay out a road map of everything you will see. Including, pretty much, the same kind of weird-ass shit you saw in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The jokes are awesome, the fight-scene choreography is wicked, the soundtrack rocks and then some (even including a perfectly appropriate track from The Sundays that Eleanor, and even I eventually, recognised); and the ending is not pat so much as preferable. Plenty of Harry Potter alums work their way in, which is always fun to see.

The reference in the title of this blog post is one which gives you a clue how these guys think. Over their long years of friendship, they took the oft-cited Shakespeare stage direction from Winter's Tale- "Exit, pursued by a bear"- and morphed it into a reference to Yogi Bear, eventually shortened to a reference to his companion Boo-Boo, whereupon all other nouns and verbs (which they also provide instruction on) left the building and they, and we, were happily left with this extreme form of exeunting.

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Then, this morning, on this holiday celebrating our labors, Eleanor went to work. I, mostly, didn't- I did spend some time returning calls, messages and texts from various family members, and cranking out a couple of documents for my early day tomorrow- and thus I had time enough at last! for either or both of last night's premium cable offerings on SHO and HBO....

Except there warn't none. Both Dex and The Newsroom took the night off for the holiday weekend, so something had to come along to pay attention to.

Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink have the news of the weird covered: they're the creative masterminds behind the popular sci-fi podcast . Though only a year old, the spooky Night Vale — which channels David Lynch, Orson Welles and H.P. Lovecraft in its descriptions of a small, weird desert town — has rocketed up the iTunes ratings list to claim the number one most downloaded spot.

Fink tells NPR's Jacki Lyden that he wanted to work on a podcast with Cranor, but he didn't want it to be anything like the podcasts he already listened to. "And I've always been fascinated by conspiracy theories. And also, to a lesser extent fascinated by the Southwest desert. Fascinating things probably happen there on a regular basis. So I came up with this idea of a town in that desert where all conspiracy theories were real, and we would just go from there with that understood."

Not sure whether to just dive in with the just-released 30th episode or start from the beginning, I opted for the pilot. And oh. My.

"The City Council announces the opening of a new dog park at the corner of Earl and Sommerset, near the Ralph’s. They would like to remind everyone that dogs are not allowed in the dog park. People are not allowed in the dog park. It is possible that you will see hooded figures in the dog park. DO NOT APPROACH THEM. DO NOT APPROACH THE DOG PARK. The fence is electrified and highly dangerous. Try not to look at the dog park, and, especially, do not look for any period of time at the hooded figures. The dog park will not harm you."

The parallels to Newton Haven are remarkable. Both have incredible soundtracks. So far, Night Vale has fewer pints of bitter, but it's early.

Definitely listen to Night Vale from the beginning! There's a surprising amount of continuity and building plots as they go on. The episodes go by pretty quickly, too.

Fandom seems obsessed with Carlos the scientist and his perfect hair, but he's not nearly as prominent as I expected (I got impatient and zipped through some episodes waiting for more references that didn't come). Still -- there's some very nice payoff later on. To many things.

I'm stuck on episode 26, the first anniversary. It ended so perfectly I just sort of want to bask in it for a while before I finish. And then I'll probably start at the beginning again, because I know I missed a lot along the way.

I'm glad you've explained what it is. I've heard much gushing from Night Vale fans, but...very little about what it IS until your post. With a blog or something, I can skim a few posts and get a sense for myself of what is going on...but the way my life is right now, I don't have good podcast listening time. I tend to only have to show up at my workplace two or three days a week, and it's only a half-mile from my home. If I could deal with the humidity better, I'd walk!

I'm still not sure if I will listen, but at least I have more of a sense of what it is, and will probably check it out if I'm in the mood for it.

That happened to me, too, all of a sudden I was hearing all these references to black helicopters and the dog park. I took the plunge last week, and now it's something I listen to while cooking or loading the dishwasher or whatever, as the eps are only 20 minutes long. I had been describing it as community access television meets This American Life meets H P Lovecraft, but I think it's good to mention the David Lynch sorts of elements, too.

I've been marathoning WTNV to the point that I'm about 10 episodes from being caught up. Really enjoying it. Tends to be my listening when I'm commuting or doing housework. I think I may be disappointed when I've caught up.

I keep being pleasantly surprised by the elements they include. They mentioned a numbers station recently, and that made me happy because they just assumed I'd know what that was, and I only barely do, so I did some reading and was delighted by the weirdness of numbers stations.

You know what else it's kind of like? Art Bell's radio shows. I may start describing it as Ira Glass meets Art Bell.